We've known about this one for a while now, but Politico highlights it again and puts some numbers to it: Climate change won't just be strengthening storms across some parts of this nation, leading to heavier rainfall and record flooding—and then new record flooding to top that record flooding. It threatens to unleash a new wave of toxic floods as well.
By Politico’s count, at least 101 highly toxic coal ash ponds and landfills already lie in FEMA-identified Special Flood Hazard Areas, the vast majority of them in the southeast and midwest. And those are the places where climate change-altered weather patterns are expected to rewrite the rules of what a "severe" flood looks like.
Coal ash ponds already pose substantial environmental threats. In 2014, a burst pipe at a Duke Energy containment pond in North Carolina dumped nearly 40,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River, leading to a new state law closing down all such ponds by 2029. Flooding produced by 2018's Hurricane Florence washed coal ash from a different Duke Energy plant into a manmade lake and, after breaching an earthen dam, into the Cape Fear River. (Florence also breached dozens of "hog lagoons," waste ponds for the urine and feces produced at major pig farms, spreading those contaminants over large areas as well.)
The dangers to regional water supplies from now-massive coal ash repositories already have many local and state governments scrambling. Coal ash is, as implied, the non-burnable results of burning coal for fuel; it is a jumble of heavy metals and other toxins that are intermingled with each coal deposit, from mercury to arsenic, that can easily migrate into both the environment (for example, in river fish) and downstream drinking water. Energy plants are of course resisting calls to transport the ash to higher and drier ground, because money.
But stronger storms and new rainfall records bring still more urgency to that "debate." If the existing barriers and precautions have not been enough to prevent regular spills along the nation's most flood-prone rivers, even higher floods threaten to overwhelm them in large numbers. And that doesn't even take into account the other potential change new rainfall patterns may bring to the midwest and southeast: rising groundwater levels that threaten capped-off coal ash fields from below.
The short version is that once again we can be fairly confident all of this will happen; the only question is when. Climate change of at least 2 degrees Celsius, long used as the measure of when climate change has become environmentally catastrophic, has already overtaken large parts of the United States; even with urgent and extraordinary international action, it is likely to spread to most, if not all, of the nation. Scientists continue to revise their climate timelines to reflect new discoveries in just how rapidly those changes are already propagating in the Arctic and Antarctic. It now looks like it will be us, not our children or grandchildren, that witness the first widespread planetary changes.
And yet again, it is a known problem that will become more expensive, and more damaging, the longer we wait. It may sound economically rash to pick up the nation's hundred most threatened coal ash deposits and move them somewhere else, but that is likely to be pocket change compared to cleaning up the results if the nation's hundred most threatened coal ash deposits are washed down every watershed from the Mississippi to New Jersey.